I know that the Cirrus Cobranet firmware has support for VLAN tagging. Is it possible to configure the Crown Amps via Snmp or HiQnet to set them up to use a particular VLAN?

THanks!

Yes it is possible.The VLAN'ing (Is that a word!!) is done in the switch. The IP addressing and gateway information can be set up in the amplifier via system architect.

The only thing to be aware of is that CN traffic works at the Mac address level, so Layer 3 VLANS will not work (as they require an IP address). Even if you IP address the CN cards, the audio traffic is still reliant on seeing the other units mac addresses.

The CN ports on the amplifiers are also used for amplifier communication, so the best way to set the system up is to have VLAN 1 as the CN VLAN, and VLAN 2 as the control VLAN, then set up a router port from VLAN 2 (control) to VLAN 1 (CN) . This routing will stop CN traffic as a router only works at layer 3

Do not use any features such as ciscos ' port security' on the CN network. This feature only allows one port of a switch to reference a mac address. So if you have a situation where the CN secondary is required the switch will not release the traffic from what was the primary switch port and audio will stop. (A CN card has one mac address but 2 ports that can reference it - even though it can only ever be one at a time)

I think there is a 'suggested network setup' available for this in the downloads section. If not PM david Glass at Crown for one.

Very basically the router is used to isolat the two VLANS. This can be either a physical network router or a Level three switch with VLAN capabilities. In the Level three switch ports can be isolated to different VLANS by a router or routers in the switch and are not a seperate physical product.

Think of a router as a gate between two neighborhoods. On one side is one VLAN with its addressing and on the other side is another VLAN with its addressing. The routers gate would have one address on one side, for that neighboorhood, and and the otherside of the router's gate would have an address for that neighborhood. These addresses are called the Gateway Addresses (original huh?)

When addressing ech of the Crown products there is a place for a Gateway address the IP address for the gatway on the side the device is attaching is placed here.

Routers are IP based products and require data packets to have IP addresses to pass through. CobraNet is MAC based so it will be blocked by a router.

All the Cobranet devices would go on one side of the router on a seperate VLAN while everything else could go on the other. See the attached diagagrams for an idea of how this works.